FASoS Colloquium: Israel, the ‘New Men’ and the ‘Orient’

FASoS Colloquium: Israel, the ‘New Men’ and the ‘Orient’: Homosexuality and Masculinity/Männerbund in Early Zionist Discourse and Today

Speakers: Ulrike Brunotte with guests from ReNGOO: “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism”, Dr. Ofer Nordheimer Nur (Tel Aviv) and Dr. Ofri Ilany (Berlin/Tel Aviv)

Date: Wednesday 4 March

Time and Place: 15.30-17.30, GG80-82, Spiegelzaal

Israel, the ‘New Men’ and the ‘Orient’: Homosexuality and Masculinity/Männerbund in Early Zionist Discourse and Today

Ulrike Brunotte with guests from ReNGOO: “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism”

Dr. Ofer Nordheimer Nur (Lecturer, Gender and Women’s Studies Programme, Tel Aviv University)
“Hashomer Hatzair as Underground Judaism in the 1920s: A Männerbund in Palestine”

Dr. Ofri Ilany (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin/Tel Aviv)
“‘Decent Life in the Sensuous Orient’: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Early Zionist Discourse”

Since the establishment of Jewish Cultural Studies, the antisemitic construction of a ‘soft’, and “feminized male Jew” and Jewish diaspora-masculinity as an “Oriental” anti-type to “Western virility”, have achieved large scholarly interest. The connection of national and gender tropes, however, was also relevant in early Zionist discourse: within the political quest for a new state governed by the “muscle Jew”, and within male bonding youth movements, which struggled for a mystical “Orient”. The two guests of our AMC-colloquium will explore how the quest for ‘new’ masculinity and the struggle to re-define homosexuality within early Zionist movements and discourse, vis-à-vis the Palestine/Arab-other, were connected to modes of Orientalisation. Commonly, references are made to homosexual practices aimed towards the European Jew or the ‘backward Orient’, but there are new developments to be considered. Ofri Ilany and Ofer Nur will connect the early 20th century constructions of the “New Zionist Man” and recent re-definitions and debates around Jewish masculinity and homosexuality vis-à-vis the Arab other.

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